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Imagine your current situation was no longer the status quo. Would you then actively choose it? If not, that’s a sign that your preference for your situation is less about its particular merits and more about a preference for the status quo.
What thought experiments do is simply reveal that your reasoning changes as your motivations change.
your initial judgments are a starting point for exploration, not an end point.
Your hesitation, or lack thereof, is a proxy for your degree of confidence that your belief is true. Contemplating a bet can also be used to pin down how sure you are quantitatively, helping you put a number on your degree of confidence.
“You want to get into a mental state where if the bad outcome comes to pass, you will only nod your head and say ‘I knew this card was in the deck, and I knew the odds, and I would make the same bets again, given the same opportunities.’”
Knowing that you’re fallible doesn’t magically prevent you from being wrong. But it does allow you to set expectations early and often, which can make it easier to accept when you are wrong.
If you want to become better at predicting people’s behavior, then shrugging off the times when they violate your expectations is exactly the wrong response.
don’t write off the other side as crazy. When their behavior confuses you, lean in to that confusion. Treat it as a clue. You’ll often find that it leads you to the information you need to resolve the negotiation.
“The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not ‘Eureka’ but ‘That’s funny
Even correct ideas often sound wrong when you first hear them.
Beliefs crystallize into identities through the feeling of being under siege from a hostile world,
Deriving pleasure from news that humiliates some ideological group you disagree with is a sign of an “oppositional identity”—an identity defined by what it opposes.
“The more labels you have for yourself, the dumber they make you.”
it’s hard to change someone’s mind when you feel morally and intellectually superior to them.
The better your message makes you feel about yourself, the less likely it is that you are convincing anyone else.”
Sigmund Freud called it the “narcissism of small differences”—for the purposes of affirming your identity, the most tempting fight is often the one that helps distinguish you from your ideological neighbors.
Whether you’re starting a company, growing an audience for your writing or networking with potential clients, you build a niche for yourself based on how you talk and act.
